The patients can hear and may respond to
suggestions, though apparently insensible to painful impressions,
and do not appear to smell, taste, or see; the eyes are closed,
turned upward, and the pupils contracted as in normal sleep.
This subject has been investigated by such authorities as Weir
Mitchell and Hammond, and medical literature is full of
interesting cases, many differing in the physiologic phenomena
exhibited; some of the most striking of these will be quoted. Van
Kasthoven of Leyden reports a strange case of a peasant of
Wolkwig who, it is alleged, fell asleep on June 29, 1706,
awakening on January 11, 1707, only to fall asleep again until
March 15th of the same year. Tuke has resurrected the remarkable
case reported by Arnold of Leicester, early in this century. The
patient's name was John Engelbrecht. This man passed into a
condition of catalepsy in which he heard everything about him
distinctly, but in his imagination he seemed to have passed away
to another world, this condition coming on with a suddenness
which he describes as with "far more swiftness than any arrow can
fly when discharged from a cross-bow." He also lost his sensation
from the head downward, and recovered it in the opposite
direction.
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